1880 Facts about Port and Madeira by Henry Vizetelly

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The Vineyards and Wines of Madeira.

a Malmsey of exceeding softness combined mtb a seductive ;sub-bitterne8S of flavour. Adjoining this veritable vinous museum there formerly stood the old theatre of Funchal,which Mr. Charles R.Blandy acquired and converted into a wine- store. Here a series of wide arches leads into a succession of ■courtyards girt round with buildings filled with pipes upon pipes of wine. In the old theatre, where wines in double pipes ■are stored, trabalhadores were busy fining wines with white of egg, while in a bind of open store a blend of fifty pipes was being made. This blend, which indicated an average age of ■eight years, proved an agreeable and not over-spirituous wine, with a slight sub-pungent flavour, and fairly brilliant in colour ■although it had not been fined. From here a staircase leads to a platform above, where an apparatus for raising and lowering casks is installed, and whence access is gained to several roomy ■^stores, each containing two or three hundred pipes. In one of these the casks were ranged in five separate rows,andinanoth3r, the floor of which rested on solid masonry supports, the pipes were placed one above the other. Here were some of thepleasant /light northern growths, which, unlike the wines vintaged on the ■south side of the island, occasionally develop the mycoderma vina, or so-called flowers of wine, so anxiously watched for and valued by the rearers of sherry. You pass on through a suc cession of stores, connected by numerous courts or landings— like so many Clapham Junctions—in which vintage wines ranging from 1865 to 1876 are contained. Here we tasted a Cama de Lobos, 1868, which had received merely two gallons of ■spirit, and had been matured in a warm store at a temperature of 95 deg. ; also, a Sao Martinho of 1870, an excellent wine of medium dryness, together with a Ponta Delgado of 1872, com bining a pleasant dryness with remarkable softness. On a sub sequent occasion we had the satisfaction of tasting some Porto da Cruz, vintaged in 1829 and bottled in 1842, of remarkable bghtness and delicacy of flavour, together with a rare vinous Sao Martinho Verdelho, boasting a wonderful perfume, and ■already more than half a century old. This was one of the